Inside story

Ready, Ken?

With only one week to go until Ken Livingstone's controversial congestion charge for London comes into effect, some questions remain. Whose idea was it in the first place? Will the technology work? Will just 300 extra buses cope with the extra load? Who's for it and who's against? Why is the press almost universally anti, when most Londoners are pro? Why should the rest of Britain take note? And how will it affect the Samaritans? Andy Beckett goes in search of answers

Fifty-two years ago, Milton Friedman, the rightwing economist and inspiration for, among others, Margaret Thatcher and General Pinochet, co-wrote what was even by his standards a forceful but slightly eccentric essay. How to Plan and Pay For the Safe and Adequate Highways We Need began with two reasonable-sounding notions: that "[on] a crowded road... it would be desirable to discourage traffic", and that "the people who drive on a road should be charged... in proportion to their use of the service".

Since road space in city centres or affected by rush hours was especially valuable, and since existing motoring taxes did not seem sufficient for its upkeep and improvement, the solution was to make the drivers who used it pay extra. "Electronic road pricing" could be introduced, Friedman concluded with a flourish, by making road markings radioactive and fitting cars with geiger counters, thus measuring precisely how far paying vehicles travelled, and how fast, and by which routes. All of this, needless to say, would be overseen by a privatised roads company. The only thing Friedman omitted to mention was how motorists would be protected from radiation sickness.

The essay was very 50s in its atomic-age optimism and it went unpublished and was quickly forgotten, until 1988, when Friedman, by now the world's most famous, or infamous, economist according to political taste, came across the manuscript by chance. It was published a few years later. A few years later still - ideas can spread slowly in politics - one evening in May 1999, Friedman's ideas about congestion charging unexpectedly resurfaced in a debate in the House of Commons. The discussion was about London and its perennial transport problems; the speaker, improbably, was Ken Livingstone, then as now a prominent leftwinger and critic of conservative economics, who had recently announced his intention to run for mayor.

"I was initially sceptical about the congestion tax," Livingstone began. "I was aware of the origins of the tax. It comes from the Thatcherite right. Milton Friedman and others argued for [it]... It is a flat-rate tax, like the poll tax. It would not be my tax of first choice." However, he continued, London's traffic was so bad, and the means of alleviating it that had been granted to the capital's mayor were so limited, there was "wide public acceptance that something like a congestion tax must be introduced". Two years later, in July 2001, when Livingstone was established as mayor and was formally unveiling his congestion charging scheme to journalists, he was clearer still about its intellectual origins: "I nicked the idea off Milton Friedman."

If there is one thing that unites opinions about the congestion charge - and there is not much - it is that the scheme due to start operating in London next Monday is a risk - the latest and probably largest in a political career built on risks and cheekiness. "Livingstone's political advisers don't agree on much," says one of the mayor's senior transport executives, "but they agree he shouldn't be doing this." The executive, who is a supporter of the congestion charge, continues: "I think the technology will work, but don't ask me to put my mortgage on it."

More independent backers of Livingstone's plan share this mixture of admiration and anxiety. "This is a very adventurous scheme," says a spokesman for Transport 2000, the environmentally inclined transport pressure group. "Nothing on this scale has been tried before in Europe. There have been decisions made in the planning that have been, while not stabs in the dark, best estimates... " The spokesman pauses. "Livingstone's got a lot of courage."

Opponents of the congestion charge use equally vivid language. The mayor is "determined to destroy London", according to the London Evening Standard. "Livingstone's transport plans are in a shambles," according to Steve Norris, the likely Conservative candidate and main challenger to Livingstone at next year's mayoral elections. "A new Stasi" will be needed to enforce the congestion charge, according to the Times. Allied with these long-standing political and media enemies of Livingstone and all his works is an encyclopedic array of London interest groups, each with their own particular gripes and worries about the congestion charge. There are the workers at Smithfield meat market, whose early shifts make driving into the charging zone almost unavoidable; central London theatre and restaurant staff whose late shifts, some argue, leave them in a similar position; unions representing people with low-paid jobs in the zone, who say paying the £5 daily charge will burden their members; people who live or work near the zone's boundaries, who fear increased local traffic and having to pay for tiny car journeys; diplomats at some London embassies, who are not necessarily accustomed to paying motoring charges; and the management of Britain's largest branch of the Samaritans in central London, who have suffered a shortage of night-time volunteers since Livingstone's scheme was announced.

Beyond these specific objections, more general doubts have accumulated. Is the charging zone, a thumbprint on the map of London, covering the city from King's Cross station in the north to Hyde Park in the west, Tower Bridge in the east to Vauxhall in the south, actually big enough to be worthwhile? Will enough drivers be deterred? Will the charge generate its promised £130m a year for the capital's infrastructure and public transport? Will the charging zone become a playground for wealthy drivers and expense-account company cars? Or swarms of scooters and other vehicles exempt from the charge? Or motorists bent on civil disobedience?

The more thoughtful congestion charge sceptics wonder whether messy, boisterous London is the kind of city that needs regulating. "The charge is all based on some myth that one wants a nice quiet city," says Paul Barker, who has been writing about the capital for decades. "The fact traffic is moving at about the same speed as it was in 1900 perhaps indicates there is something in the nature of London that means that's the correct speed."

Yet for all these arguments, which have been helpfully amplified by a press almost universally against the charge, Livingstone's scheme has maintained a stubborn momentum. No convincing alternatives have been suggested. Polls of Londoners have continued to show small majorities for the charge. Transport thinkers of all ideological types have declared themselves in favour. And even the government, which tried so hard to stop Livingstone becoming mayor, has quietly communicated its approval: "They don't want to be associated with it," says Professor David Begg, a senior transport adviser to both the government and the mayor, "but it is important for them that this works."

In a country increasingly preoccupied by its overcrowded, fraying transport systems, the fate of the London congestion charge is of more than local significance. Dozens of other British local authorities are watching, with charging schemes of their own in mind. More fundamentally, Livingstone's plan may be the first substantial attempt to restrict the car since the map of Britain began to be redrawn in its favour a century ago. More fundamentally still, the congestion charge may be the sort of unpalatable but essential social reform - backed by the experts but deeply divisive - that modern politicians are increasingly reluctant to initiate. Or it may turn out to be a very public folly: the Millennium Dome of transport policies. As Norris puts it, in a moment of attempted even-handedness: "Ken will do things which are unpopular because he thinks they're right. But bravery in a politician is only a wafer away from getting something drastically wrong."

At the headquarters of Transport for London (TfL), which is responsible for the congestion charge and the mayor's other transport policies, the confident but not uncritical tone that Livingstone uses whenever he talks about the scheme is faithfully echoed. Maps of the charging zone are eagerly unfurled for journalists, all rational straight lines and bold colours, while shrugs and eye-rolling accompany predictions of congestion charge "horror stories" in the weeks following February 17. The sound of bad-tempered traffic from the streets below the TfL towerblock, which is just inside the charging zone in the exhaust-coloured canyons of Victoria, implicitly makes Livingstone's case for him.

That TfL's sympathies are not first and foremost with London's drivers is rather obvious from the posters and mission statements that line the corridors. "Key areas of work," reads one, "include bus priority... pedestrians... people with disabilities... cyclists... " Cars are scarcely mentioned or pictured, except when they are taxis, or are waiting at pedestrian crossings, or being ticketed.

"We are trying to make London a more civilised place to be in," says Derek Turner, TfL's head of street management. He is a neat middle-aged man with a technician's air and a calm, nasal voice not a million miles from Livingstone's. Before TfL was set up three years ago, Turner spent a decade as London's first and only traffic director. To some pro-car campaigners, "Red Derek" is second only to the mayor in his malicious intentions.

Turner's philosophy, in essence, is that London has no room for more roads, so its existing road space needs to be used as efficiently and fairly as possible, not just by drivers but by public transport and cyclists and pedestrians. Since the car dominated the capital's street management for most of the 20th century, a process of, as he neutrally puts it, "reallocating space" from motorists to other road users has been necessary since. He has become used to being shouted at by drivers at public meetings: "People criticise the congestion charge, but I've been here before," he says with a dry smile. "When I introduced red routes there were protesters blocking roads."

Turner gave evidence in favour of a London congestion charge to a parliamentary select committee as far back as the early 80s. "The theory of congestion charging is absolutely... " He closes his eyes, and then opens them again, shining. "You can't fault it! Most transport schemes take 10 to 15 years to make a profit. This will take 15 months." He says it will take less time - "six months" - for the scheme "to start seeing consistent steady benefits" such as faster central London journey times and school-holiday levels of traffic inside the charging zone all year round.

But what about the turbulence even TfL's own reports predict around the edge of the zone? "People will change their routes. There will be some what we call 're-assignments'." Turner picks up a pen and starts sketching on a piece of paper precisely how a crossroads at the border of the zone will work, complete with traffic flow percentages. Thousands of rat-running, late-running London commuters are smoothly carried to their destinations by his arrows. Does he find the congestion charge an exciting project? "Exciting? Oh God, yes. No doubt about that."

There is not quite the same sense of openness and eagerness at the actual nerve centre of the scheme. The congestion charge "hub site", as it is known at TfL, is a single long windowless room in east London, the location of which visitors are requested not to reveal. Entry is through the same sort of sealed-chamber security doors that protect MP's offices. A taciturn man in a raincoat from Capita, the private company contracted by Livingstone to administer the congestion charge, shadows the guide from TfL, speaking only when you ask a sensitive question.

Under the room's bright lights stand rows of tall blank boxes like filing cabinets. Spotless white computer cables hang from the back of each. Air conditioning hums. Half a dozen impassive men in shirt sleeves pad about on the tiled floor, attending to keyboards and television monitors. Into this hushed electronic library, it is intended, will be fed the number plate details of every vehicle that passes one of the hundreds of cameras around and inside the congestion charging zone on a weekday between 7am and 6.30pm. Every midnight, the number plates of that day's congestion zone drivers will be checked against a list of the vehicles whose drivers have paid the charge by the end of the day as required. The addresses of non-payers will be obtained from the government's Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), and fines dispatched, starting at £40, increasing to £120 if not paid within 28 days, and culminating - assuming there is no successful appeal - in the clamping, removal and sale of your vehicle if the penalty remains unpaid.

Anxieties have been expressed that this intricate back-and-forth is in the hands of Capita and the DVLA. The latter's records do not cover every London driver; estimates of the proportion of names missing, because of problems with the DVLA's computers and the shifting, sometimes shifty nature of the capital's driving population, range from a tenth to a quarter. Meanwhile, Capita has been acquiring a mixed reputation as an administrator of large government projects. Last year, its failure to run security checks on teachers on time delayed the start of the autumn term for thousands of pupils. At the congestion charge hub site, the one staff member produced to be interviewed has stubble and a weary manner. Has he worked on anything like this before? He shakes his head and laughs: "I'll be a lot happier when this has been running for five years."

Transport for London's response to all these technical doubts is to point out that the machinery of congestion charging - from its streetcorner cameras to its use of DVLA records - is based on TfL's existing, largely successful system for catching and fining drivers who trespass in bus lanes. More broadly, backers of Livingstone's scheme argue that its slightly cobbled-together quality and suspect ideological origins have been a product of necessity. "I would go for something much more comprehensive with more advanced technology," says David Begg. "But can Livingstone afford to wait?" Begg says an ideal charging system would take up to 10 years to install. "If he doesn't do it (now), we're heading for traffic moving at two-and-a-half miles per hour in peak hours."

London, Begg says, is "in the top six most congested cities in the world". Precise comparative figures do not exist, but the capital's notoriety for this is almost as old as the city itself. London started as a narrow, dense riverside settlement and stayed that way until the 19th century; then the city burst outwards to become a great brick sprawl, with people living unprecedented distances, for city residents, from their workplaces. Roads have almost always been a problem: too narrow, too twisting, too long and spindly. Much of the city's transport history has been about finding alternatives: the Thames, the underground, suburban railways, even a proposed system of raised bypasses made of glass for mid-19th century pedestrians.

By the mid-20th century, it was becoming clear to some transport thinkers that such alternatives were no longer sufficient to save the streets from gridlock. In 1958, the renowned British traffic expert Colin Buchanan described urban congestion as "a social evil". The idea of using a charge to alleviate it in London began to circulate among planners and economists, drawing on both Friedman's new notion of road space as a commodity and the capital's intermittent history of road tolls going back to the fee for using the newly-repaired route from Temple Bar to St Giles in 1270.

The only problem was that most British politicians felt congestion charging would be electorally disastrous. From the 50s until the late 90s, whenever the idea was favoured by an official report or an unusually adventurous transport minister, charging was quickly dismissed by more important authorities as impractical, or postponed to some date in the comfortably distant future. Even Livingstone's Greater London Council (GLC), which was not noted for its caution, steered away. "We had a manifesto in 1981 that considered it and rejected it," says Dave Wetzel, then chairman of the GLC's transport committee. The GLC decided to introduce radically reduced fares on public transport instead.

Meanwhile, congestion charging was tried abroad: in Singapore, Holland and Norway. Yet these schemes were relatively small, involving a few easily-regulated bypasses or main roads at a time, and were introduced in political cultures rather different from Britain's. The schemes that survived, moreover, were less concerned with reducing traffic jams than with raising money for road improvements. It was not until 1998, when Livingstone announced his candidacy for mayor of London, that a large-scale charging proposal that took into account the interests of non-drivers was put before an electorate.

The reception was surprising. One evening during Livingstone's election campaign, he spoke in Hampstead in north London. Outside the venue, large cars were double-parked and gated mansions marched uphill to the horizon. But inside, when Livingstone, lizard-eyed and deadpan, brought up the congestion charge - at length and with no attempt at sugaring the details - there was a barrage of applause. Other campaign meetings, and the comfortable margin of Livingstone's eventual victory, seemed to suggest that a consensus had crystallised.

As an independent politician of rare prominence, Livingstone did not need to worry about party subordinates cooling towards the congestion charge. He reappointed Wetzel and his other old GLC transport executives; these veterans of Fare's Fair and the night-time lorry ban and the GLC's other ambitious attempts to reform transport in the capital seemed ideally suited to finally implementing congestion charging. Under Livingstone's GLC, says Wetzel, sitting in the TfL offices with a nostalgic look in his eye, commuting by car into central London fell by 11%. This is virtually the same reduction promised by TfL for the congestion charge.

While it once seemed to appeal to all kinds of Londoners, these days the scheme polarises people in a way strongly reminiscent of Livingstone's GLC. "What I find extraordinary," said a woman in an expensive black coat at a meeting of anti-congestion charge protesters in London last month, "is that this man has been allowed to... " She threw up her hands, and fixed her eyes once more on the Smithfield meat porter sitting next to her. "Did you see him [defending the charge] on Question Time? It made you want to throw up." The porter maintained a slightly stunned silence.

The theatre hired for the meeting contained a strange mixture of thickset men in anoraks and women with smart accents. There were few people under 40, and almost everybody was white in the half-full auditorium; the broader modern London that struggles daily with public transport did not feel well represented. "Rescue London", one of the protesters' placards read, "Much more - and cheaper - parking in and out of town. No congestion charge. Re-widen roads. Reset traffic lights. More under and overpasses... " The speeches struck a similar slightly unreal note. An MP from outer London complained that the congestion charge would be harsh on his low-paid constituents - although poorer Londoners are the least likely to own a car and the least likely to use it for commuting into the centre - then, in almost the same breath, started describing how his constituents needed to drive to "get into the City when the far eastern markets open". The meeting ended defiantly with threats of non-payment and court challenges, but when the protesters spilled out of the theatre the lunchtime traffic along Shaftesbury Avenue looked even more intolerable than usual.

"It would be a foolish [mayoral] candidate who assumes that the congestion charge is automatically going to unseat Ken," admits Norris. "Only about 20% of Londoners during the next calendar year will have to worry about paying the congestion charge." Car ownership in the capital is low - almost 40% of households do not have one - and commuting by car into central London is a minority occupation - more than 80% of people use public transport for these journeys instead.

Livingstone has a history of understanding the capital's particular habits and social contours better than most politicians: his much-criticised GLC policies to help ethnic and sexual minorities, for example, have won him substantial electoral benefits ever since. Opponents of the congestion charge also tend to forget that being widely attacked is virtually Livingstone's natural state. On Question Time, with the audience grumbling and the pro-motoring polemicist Jeremy Clarkson in full spate, Livingstone listened, spoke evenly and disarmingly, and occasionally laughed, showing his sharp little teeth.

It is possible, of course, that the congestion charge could fail so dramatically that all his political skills and all the decades of transport experts gradually agreeing on and refining the idea become irrelevant. The 300 extra buses to be provided daily from next Monday, for example, could be swamped if substantially more drivers stop using their cars than TfL predicts. Livingstone himself has hinted that the congestion charge could be withdrawn if it does not reduce congestion or if "a fundamental flaw" appears. "He and I have got an understanding about what a catastrophic failure would be," says Derek Turner at TfL. How do they define catastrophic? Turner replies unblinkingly: "Total gridlock over the whole inner ring road. Over a number of days."

He is more worried that there will be a succession of smaller problems, each one magnified by the press, while the relatively undramatic benefits of the charge go unreported. Permanently changing the behaviour of London drivers will most likely take years. Yet by the next mayoral election, in May 2004, the congestion charge will have been running for less than 15 months. One of Livingstone's senior advisers says that the scheme was originally supposed to start operating last summer, but the technology was not ready and more consultation with London interest groups was required. In the meantime, Livingstone's poll ratings have weakened, as the congestion charge has acquired doubters, and his lack of powers in other areas has become obvious.

The trouble with environmental reforms is that almost everybody loves them in theory but fewer people love them as their practice becomes a possibility. Norris, who is currently only a few per cent behind Livingstone in the polls, was a strong advocate of congestion charging during the 90s, and says he is not against it in principle now. "It's certainly something that perhaps we could start looking at," he says. "But Ken's rushed in a scheme that really needed a lot more reconnaissance." It is not hard to imagine a sea of nodding heads.

Yet perhaps London does not need any more transport feasibility studies. Its population is rising after decades of decline, and is forecast to swell substantially further. The traffic jams, without any restriction placed on car usage, need only be imagined. And an imperfect congestion charge, once in place, can always be altered. Then its unlovely black camera poles and unsubtle red signposts may become just another ambiguous but largely unquestioned piece of urban planning, like yellow lines and parking meters.

In Durham, a small-scale congestion charge has been operating since October. A tight medieval street with barely any pavements, where cars coming in opposite directions used to block each other, fuming, for minutes at a time, is now full of pedestrians strolling along the middle of the road. Traffic is down by 80%. The council is triumphant. Some shopkeepers in the charging area complain that deliveries have become more difficult and that trade is down. But most of the people I spoke to already seemed a bit bored with the congestion charge. When, and if, that happens in London, Ken has won.